The ISO Filesystem

This is how to create the ISO-Filesystem for the CD. The trick is to tell mkisofs not to stick to the standards. Use long filenames, merge UNIX-permissions and owners into the filesystem, merge special characters - in short: do everything, that is not allowed by the standard. We don't care, if every operating system can read our CD, because the CD contains the operating system which definitely can read the CD itself. Read man mkisofs to get the whole detail about the switches.

mkisofs -l -U -R -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat  \

-no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o /mnt/to_burn/IPsec_vpn.iso .

The -b switch is the important one. It tells mkisofs to create a bootable CD. The switch -no-emul-boot defines the type of boot-cd. This mode will not emulate a floppy (as the 2.6 kernel without modules usually won't fit on a floppy), nor hard-disk mode. It will tell the bios to boot the bootloader (defined in the -b switch) from the CD.

Luckily, mkisofs adds all these command-line switches to the iso itself. A hexdump of the original fedora-cd shows the mkisofs command (within the first 100 lines).